In The Forest Of Harm (9 page)

TEN

Do you guys remember the day we met?” Joan studied Mary and Alex across the fire. The flames gave her face the look of an eerie pumpkin.

“I do.” Mary sat on the lip of the fissure, the moon rising huge and yellow behind her shoulder. “Dr. Walker's section of Constitutional Law. Mondays at nine.”

“You sat beside that blond guy from Indiana who wore a coat and tie.” Alex grinned. “You always borrowed his notes. Mary and I used to wonder if you had anything going with him.”

“No,” said Joan. “He was gay.” She shot Alex a dark look. “But I always wondered if
you
were sleeping with Mark Holcomb.”

“Mark Holcomb?” Alex crinkled her nose. “Dopey Mark Holcomb? I'd rather go to bed with a personal appliance.”

“You'd probably have more fun,” Mary chuckled.

“Which brings me to you, Mary Crow,” Joan said, scooting closer to the flames. “I want to ask you a question.”

“Okay,” replied Mary. “What?”

Joan hunched her knees up close to her chest. “Tell me about you and Jonathan Walkingstick.”

Alex cleared her throat loudly, as if to signal Joan to
shut up,
but Joan ignored her and kept her eyes on Mary.

Mary swirled her brandy under her nose, allowing the sweet, potent aroma to fill her head. “Not much to tell, really. Rings, proms, the whole high-school sweetheart thing.” She glanced at Alex, who was looking at her with a hesitant smile.

“Oh, come on,” Joan nudged. “My
amore
genes are picking up vibes. There's a lot more to you two than just high-school sweethearts.”

“Joan!” This time Alex glared at Joan across the fire, but again Joan ignored her.

Mary watched a charred pine log collapse into the embers, throwing up a shower of fiery sparks. Up to now she'd trusted only Alex with this story, but Joan had long been a close friend, too. Maybe it was time to let her in on the secret as well.

“Jonathan was my first friend here. In grade school the other girls considered me odd—light skin, no father, a mother who'd married a rich white boy, then come back a widow and tried to weave tapestries for a living. They called me Crazy Crow. Old Crow. Scarecrow.

“Jonathan, though, didn't care how much the other kids teased me. He lived up the mountain. The two of us and Billy Swimmer played together every day. Our yard was a thousand acres of forest. We blazed trails and swung on grapevines and pretended we were Robin Hood and Tarzan.”

“You didn't play cowboys and Indians?” Joan's voice rose in surprise.

Mary shook her head as she took a sip of brandy. “Nobody was ever willing to be the cowboy. Anyway, when we got to high school, Jonathan and I began to date. We were just as happy as a couple as we had been as friends. We never went out with anybody else.”

He looked at her di ferently that day on the school bus. New
eyes—hungry, questioning eyes probed her as if she were some
fresh creature invented just for him that very morning. Her palms
grew damp. In a way he scared her. In another way, she didn't
want to ever leave his side. “Save my seat,” he'd whispered as he
got up to go borrow someone's science book. She'd never forgotten
the way those words rang in her head.

“So what happened?” Joan hunched forward eagerly. “Why did you guys break up?”

Mary held the cup of brandy against her cheek and closed her eyes.
Here comes the hard part
, she thought.

“Jonathan and I were together on the afternoon my mother was killed.” She stared at a gray rind of ash along one sooty log. “It was the first time we'd made love—the first time I'd made love with anybody.”

It's Thursday night, and they'd dawdled their way home from
band practice, unwilling to leave the heady spring evening for the
rigors of geometry homework. They sit on an old moss-covered
log, laughing about Mr. Mooney, the band director. Jonathan
removes his shirt. His chest is sculpted and hairless, and reminds
Mary of the torso of Hermes in her World History book.Though
she knows she shouldn't, she reaches over and touches him. His
skin is tight and warm; she can feel the rapid drubbing of his
heart. Suddenly his hand is under her blouse, and electricity jolts
through her and then they are behind the log, discovering each
other in that sweet April air.They do not speak. He is warm and
heavy and smells clean, like new grass.The first time she flinches
at the small sting of pain.The second time she figures out to rise
and meet him and together they ride away on a velvet horse of
their own invention.

“I got back to the store about a minute after my mother was murdered,” Mary said.
You heard footsteps and
you couldn't even go to the window to see who was walking
away.
Her old coward mantra started ringing in her head. The years had not dimmed its power to condemn. Suddenly she felt herself shrinking, the strong muscles in her body withering as she sat there.

“Oh, my God!” Joan's eyes were dark pools in the firelight. “How awful!”

“I used to think that if I'd just come straight to the store that afternoon, nothing would have happened.” Mary fought to keep her voice even. “Sometimes I still think that might be true.”

Joan reached over and squeezed her leg. “Don't—you think like that, you'll drive yourself crazy.”

Mary looked back into the fire and thought of the stones at the base of her mother's grave, and of the six men she'd hungrily convicted of murder. “Sometimes I wonder if I'm not crazy already.”

“Don't go there, Mary,” Alex said. “You're no crazier than the rest of us.”

“Is this the first time you've seen Jonathan since your mom's death?” Joan's question floated above the fire like a wisp of ash.

“Oh, I saw him at her funeral. He was as horrified as everybody else. He and Billy ditched school for a week to search for her killer.” Mary leaned over and rearranged a half-charred log. “I saw him alone only once more, then my grandmother came and took me to Atlanta.” She looked up. “And what could I have said to him, anyway? ‘Hey, Cherokee-boy, if we hadn't been fucking, my mom might still be alive' ?”

Suddenly a single thunderous boom shattered the air above them. Then that sound was replaced by a high, piercing scream that wavered somewhere between human and not.

“Jeez!” Joan leapt to her feet, her collapsible cup tumbling to the ground, spilling brandy onto the rocks. “What the hell was
that
?”

Mary stood, too, and stared into the blackness. The first sound she recognized—the simple deep report of a shotgun. The second noise she couldn't place. No animal she'd ever heard up here made a cry like that.

“Oh, it's probably just some juiced-up hunters trying to scare each other.” She tried to make her voice light.

“What would anybody be hunting in the dark?” The flames deepened the hollows underneath Joan's cheekbones.

“Bears, maybe. Somebody could be poaching red wolves. They've reintroduced wolves to the forest and a lot of people don't like it.”

“Isn't it illegal to hunt at night?” Alex looked up at her.

“Not necessarily.” Mary shrugged. “And anyway, who's up here to write them a ticket?”

“Gosh, they won't hear us and think we're red wolves, will they?” Joan rubbed her arms as if she were cold.

“No. Wolves are smart, but they don't drink brandy around campfires at night.” When Joan did not laugh, Mary answered more seriously. “They're probably miles away. The sound travels funny up here.”

“Everything travels funny up here, if you ask me.” Joan fished in her pocket for her cigarettes.

They huddled around the fire, that old fighter-of-night that the Cherokees regarded as a living spirit who both kept their secrets and revealed their dreams. When the low, shimmying flames had warmed them again, Joan spoke.

“Mary, I'm sorry for making you dredge up all that old stuff about your mom. It seems like every rock you turn over in this forest, something nasty crawls out.”

Mary gazed into the fire and thought of the Old Men. “That's just quid pro quo for the mountains. If they give you something, they always expect something in return.”

They poured another round of brandy, then Alex started folding herself into a yoga position called the Crow.

Mary laughed as Alex's long arms and lanky legs stuck out like pipe-straws, but even as she laughed, she kept one ear tuned to the forest. That scream had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. If something strange was roaming around out there she wanted to know about it before her friends did. She peered past Alex into the darkness beyond, waiting for whatever it was to shriek again, but everything remained silent; their own voices were the only noises in the glittering black stillness of the autumn night.

They talked on, the familiar chatter of her friends comforting her. Alex carped on about how there were only three people in Atlanta who could give you a decent haircut; Joan's accent took on a decidedly Brooklyn edge as she complained that the shoe sales at Saks almost never included size five. When the embers had burned down into mere pinpoints of orange, Mary was calm again—the gunshot and the strange, inhuman cry had receded into just another odd memory of a forest night.

She got to her feet. “I'm hitting the tick, ladies.”

“You're what?” Joan exclaimed, horrified.

“Going to bed.” Mary laughed as she pulled her sweatshirt over her head. “That's mountain speak. I don't know about you guys, but I'm whipped.”

“Me, too,” said Joan. “My legs feel like concrete.”

“Just wait till tomorrow,” Alex warned. “They'll feel like concrete
underwater
.”

Inside, the cave was dark and smelled of dry dust. Zipping themselves into their tent, Alex stripped down to her long johns and jumped into Charlie Carter's arctic sleeping bag while Joan took off her boots and curled up in her new bag. Mary climbed into her old flannel bedroll between them.

“Anybody need to pee?” Alex asked, her hand on the lantern's switch.

“Not bad enough to leave this tent,” answered Joan. “It's too long and cold a walk in the dark.”

“I'm okay, Alex,” Mary replied.

Alex started to switch off the light, then she grinned and made a face above the lantern. “Anybody want to tell ghost stories? I know some good ones.”

“No, Alex. You ask that every time we sleep in the same room. Nobody wants to hear any ghost stories. Spending the night in this cave with you is scary enough.” Joan tugged her sleeping bag over her head. “I'll see you guys in the morning.”

“Good night, Alex,” Mary said, laughing at the crestfallen look on Alex's face.

“Good night,” Alex sniffed, turning off the lantern. “And sweet dreams to all who
deserve
them.”

Darkness enveloped them like a glove; then in a little while Mary felt a soft tug on her sleeping bag.

“Mary?” a voice whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.” Mary smiled knowingly in the dark. Joan always saved her most troublesome questions for last.

“Do you really think those hunters are miles away?”

“Absolutely.” Mary snuggled into her sleeping bag, breathing in its woodsy, cedar-chip smell. “If they're locals, they know not to try this trail at night. If they're not locals, then they couldn't find this trail even if they wanted to. Don't worry. We're safe.”

“I hope so,” Joan replied through a yawn. “Goodnight, then.
Buona notte
.”

“Goodnight.” Mary turned on her side and closed her eyes. At first she saw nothing, then Cal Whitman's face and her mother's slain body floated before her. Footsteps echoed, walking away. She shuddered. Too bad Joan hadn't let Alex tell her ghost story. A mythical monster would be preferable to the real ones that roamed through her dreams.

ELEVEN

Lou Delgado had just taken his second bite of warm pecan pie when a shadow fell across the sunny table. Coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup as someone jostled his booth. He looked up. Mitchell Whitman slid into the seat across from him.

Whitman tapped the Rolex on his wrist. “It's eight o'clock, Saturday morning, Mr. Delgado.”

Lou forced down his pie, its sweetness suddenly a sticky, sodden lump in his mouth. “I got what you wanted.”

Whitman folded his hands and waited, as if expecting to be dealt a lucky hand of poker. “And?”

Lou picked up a manila envelope from the seat beside him and plopped it down on the table. “These just came from the darkroom.”

Whitman opened the envelope. Inside was a photographic contact sheet—36 tiny black-and-white pictures all on one piece of paper. Turning the sheet sideways, he looked at the images. Three women loading camping gear into the trunk of a BMW, the car traveling down a gravel road, the three again coming out of some hayseed general store. The final picture showed the Beemer parked in some forest.

He looked at Lou. “So Mary Crow's gone camping?”

“Sure has. Somewhere between East Bumblefuck, North Carolina, and Nowhere, Tennessee. It's written on the back of the sheet.”

Whitman turned the page. “Little Jump Off Trail?”

“Hillbilly country.” Lou winked at Paula, the morning waitress, as she freshened his coffee. “Where the feds managed to piss off the locals so bad they lost that Rudolph guy.”

Whitman's eyes darted up at Delgado. “Who?”

“Eric Rudolph. The guy who
allegedly
blew up that abortion clinic in Birmingham. He got his ass up in those mountains and the cops haven't seen him since.” Delgado chuckled.

Whitman shrugged, disinterested, as he began to re-examine each picture. When he looked up again, his lips drew back in that awful smile. “Mr. Delgado, you've just opened a whole new realm of possibilities for me.”

“Oh yeah?” Lou sat back in the booth and stirred his coffee. “Possibilities for what?”

“Like I told you before. Mary Crow knows too much. I intend to see that she has nothing more to do with the prosecution of this case.”

“Look, kid, there's something you don't understand. The DA's office is like a real deep baseball team. Mary Crow gets benched, another lawyer'll step up to the plate. Stopping Mary Crow ain't gonna stop this case. Your brother's already been convicted.”

“You don't understand. We're the Whitmans, for God's sake . . .”

“Wouldn't matter if you were the Jesus H. Christs. You whack somebody, they'll come after you.”

Mitchell clenched his teeth. “Then let's just say it's personal. Something between Mary Crow and me needs to be resolved.”

Delgado frowned, feeling as if he were about to set something very bad into motion. “And how are you gonna resolve this personal thing?”

Whitman spread the fingers of his right hand and studied his palm. “Haven't decided yet.”

“You wouldn't be thinking of going up in those woods, would you?”

“What if I am?”

“Because my guy says it's pretty rough where they went.”

Whitman's fingers curled into a fist. “I led tactical ROTC squads every semester in undergraduate school. And my Dad and I have hunted all over the country. Alaska. Maine. The Canadian Rockies. I don't think the Smoky Mountains would present too much of a challenge.”

“I think you're wrong.”

Whitman frowned. “Why?”

Delgado leaned forward. “Because even if you were the General Patton of your ROTC unit and bagged every moose in Maine, you still got no business hunting lawyers in the jungle. Trust me, kid. You do that, and you're in way over your head. This Mary Crow's like a bad dog with a big bone. You don't want to piss her off.”

For the first time Whitman threw back his head and laughed, revealing a mouthful of square white teeth. “You actually think I should be
afraid
of her?”

“She roughed you up pretty good on the witness stand, didn't she? Everybody in town was laughing about it.”

Whitman's smile faded as his eyes abruptly took on a sheen like black ice.

Delgado shook his head. “Kid, you got an old man who can throw enough money at the system to get your brother off on appeal. So this chick DA made you look like a yo-yo on TV. People will have a little chuckle about it, then the next chump will come along. Go get laid. Go build your dam in South America. It'll work out better for everybody in the long run.”

Whitman grinned at Lou as if he had him in the crosshairs of a gun sight, then he slid the contact sheet back in the envelope and closed the clasp.

“Thanks, Mr. Delgado.” He clapped Lou hard on the back as he rose from the table. “You've no idea how helpful you've been.”

Mitch Whitman pulled his car out of the Copper Pot parking lot and turned south on I-75, heading toward Georgia Tech.
Mary Crow roughed you up on the witness
stand
, Delgado's voice rang in his ears.
Everybody in town
was laughing about it
. He put the thought out of his mind as he sped around a wobbling truck carrying chickens to market.

Camping
, he thought, glancing over at the pictures on the seat beside him.
The fucking bitch hangs us all out to dry
and then goes on a nature walk
. He'd assumed she would do what most career girls did on Atlanta weekends—shop at Phipps, dinner in Virginia Highlands, then drinks in Buckhead. He figured Delgado would bring him a list of restaurants and nightclubs along with the name of some lover, and he could have had her taken care of at some place where she felt at home.

But camping. This was far better than he'd ever expected. He laughed out loud as he exited off the highway and pointed his Porsche toward Mincy's Sporting Goods. For the first time since his little brother had graduated from diapers, things were looking up. With just a little careful planning, he would be able to enjoy a woodsy autumn weekend and make sure Mary Crow would never squeeze anybody's balls again.

Three hours later Mitch Whitman stood in his old bedroom in his father's house. Though he'd kept his apartment near Tech, he'd moved most of his stuff back home after Cal had been arrested. His mother had been too much of a basket case then, and his father had asked him to come home and “keep her company.”

“Her damn friends won't call her anymore,” he'd told Mitch. “You can take her mind off things.”

Mitch thought that the Jack Daniels his mother sipped from noon through Oprah Winfrey kept her mind off most things, but he did what his father had asked. Few people, he'd noticed, ever denied a direct request from Calhoun Whitman, Sr.

Now he stood, dressed in jeans and a yellow Georgia Tech T-shirt, surveying the array of equipment spread out on his bed. Beside his sleeping bag and camp stove was an unusual selection of high-tech gear. Night-vision goggles, a handheld VHF radio, and a GPS positioner lay next to a Colt Light 30.06 with a long-range scope. A 9mm Beretta pistol gleamed dully next to the rifle, amid three different kinds of survival knives and a dozen boxes of ammunition. Mitch smiled. He had enough firepower on this bed to bring down any animal in the southeast United States.

Prepare for everything
. Mitch remembered his father's admonition before every hunting trip they'd taken together.
And expect the worst
. Mitch wished he'd remembered that at Sandra Manning's house that night, but there was nothing to be done about that now.

“Did you know Sandra Manning before she was killed, Mr.
Whitman?” Thanks to his brother's asshole attorney calling him
as a character witness, that question had kicked off the worst hour
of his life. Mary Crow had leaned right up against the stand
when she'd cross-examined him—stood so close that he could see
the tiny vein throbbing on one side of her long throat. Her heart
beat calmly, delicately, while his hammered in his chest like a
drum.

“No.”That lie was his first mistake.

“Really?” Mary Crow prissed over to her table, the kick pleat
in her slim black skirt revealing shapely legs.“Then why on earth
would Sandra's phone records indicate that she called your apartment every day for the past six months?” Mary Crow held up a
thick stack of papers.

His mouth froze; became unable to form words. How could he
have forgotten about the fucking phone records? Mary Crow
walked back to the stand.

“Who do you think Sandra Manning called there, Mr.
Whitman? Your roommates?” Mary Crow checked her records.
“And why would Sandra talk to them for fifteen, twenty, thirty
minutes at a time?”

“Well, maybe I did know her,” he admitted, his face heating
up. The reporters in the back of the courtroom perked up. They
were looking at him, whispering and scribbling on their notepads
as he squirmed.

“Bitch,” he repeated now, aiming the rifle at his reflection in the bedroom mirror. “Before I'm done, you'll wish you'd finished me off in court.”

With a hot anger rising in his gut, he put the rifle back on the bed and sat down at the desk that had served as his worktable since he was fourteen, when he got his first computer. On top of the plans for the dam in Veracruz de Calbuco were three pictures of Mary Crow. One showed her tonguing a blonde woman; in another she straddled a black man. The third was a nude shot of Mary alone, her legs spread wide, sprawled in a leather chair. Mitch looked at the pictures and smiled. Of course none of them were really Mary Crow—all were just her head pasted on porn shots he'd downloaded from the Net. Earlier that morning, though, with just a few clicks of his mouse, he had hacked into some French guy's screen name and E-mailed the shot of Mary with the Negro to everybody in the Georgia legal system. He chuckled. His little electronic masterpiece would cause Mary some embarrassment. Too bad she wasn't going to survive the weekend long enough to suffer through it.

He thumbed through the papers on his desk until he found a pink sheet with all of Mary Crow's numbers on it—Social Security, driver's license, address, telephone, credit cards. Yesterday afternoon he had maxed out her Visa and tanked her credit. This morning he had humiliated her with a dirty picture. Tomorrow he would take care of Mary Crow forever, and the cover was perfect. When she didn't show up for work on Monday, people would figure that having her affair with the black buck exposed had frightened her off. After her credit card scandal broke they would assume the heartbroken and disgraced Mary Crow had just flapped her wings and flown off into oblivion. Nothing else had ever worked out so well in his whole life.

He slipped the photos and credit card numbers in a folder and filed it in the bottom drawer of his desk. From the same drawer he pulled out another folder labeled “Alternates” and flipped it open. Paper-clipped together in four small stacks were four separate identities—driver's licenses, credit cards, draft cards, one even with a card from Blockbuster for a video store membership.

“Okay.” Mitch riffled through the cards. “Who do I want to be today?” He looked at them all, then chose Mitchell Keane, a registered Republican and card-carrying Rotarian from Athens, Georgia. Digging his wallet from his back pocket, he slipped Mitchell Keane's IDs behind his own, then he locked the other papers back in the drawer.

With expert ease he stowed his gear in a large backpack and grabbed his rifle. Along with a camouflage suit, he had food and supplies for a week. If he couldn't get this job done in that amount of time, then he might just fly down to Chile early and not bother coming back home.

Downstairs his father's voice thundered from the library, demanding an answer to some legal question. Mitch stashed his pack in the dark closet at the end of the hall and walked to the double library doors. He cracked one open. Some idiot lawyer was catching hell. He hoped it was the same incompetent fucker who'd put him on the stand. His father stood at his massive desk, a phone glued to his ear, his finger stabbing at some paragraph in a thick legal tome. Whoever it was, Mitch was glad
he
wasn't on the other end of that call.

“I tell you she shouldn't even be in the Georgia legal system,” Cal Whitman roared. “She's a goddamn Cherokee. According to the treaty my own damn ancestor wrote, she's an illegal alien. She ought to be out in Oklahoma, frying bread for tourists.”

Mitch stepped forward as his father listened on the phone. “Hey, Dad. I just wanted to tell you that I'm flying up to D.C. for the weekend—”

His father put the receiver to his chest, ignoring the voice still buzzing from the phone. “Your brother just got convicted of murder and you're going to Washington?”

Mitch felt his stomach shrivel, as it always did when he talked to his father, but he ignored it and planted his legs wide apart.

“I'm meeting some guys from the dam project there,” he replied. “I'll be back next week.”

Big Cal regarded his strapping firstborn a moment, then he lifted his hand in farewell. “Be back here Wednesday. And tell your mother where you're going.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitch said as he backed out the door.

“Maybe I'll bring you a present, Dad. Something that will help you sleep better at night.”

Cal, Sr., didn't reply.

Mitch turned and walked back through the hall to the den. His mother and Lucille, their maid, sat together shelling pecans and watching some man weeping on the Jenny Jones show. Daytime television had become their diversion-of-choice. Since Cal's arrest they had probably watched enough talk shows and shelled enough pecans to send a pie to every drug-abusing, wife-beating bisexual transvestite in America.